Saturday, June 4, 2011

"What really are the most important works by this or that composer? What are the recordings that assure one of a definitive interpretation? Panorama, a 2-CD series, is designed to help one make a start, using as its material the treasure-house of music, performances and artists that is the DG catalogue.

Panorama steers a tour of the great composers and their very best music: works by Bach and Handel, by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, by Verdi and Wagner, by Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev. Not only that, Panorama traverses the important epochs of musical history: the mysteries of Gregorian chant, the fascinating sound-world of the Renaissance, the splendours of the Baroque era." From DG's official page.

Here's the Spotify playlist: DG: Panorama Series (842 tracks, total time: 2 days) This playlist works better in Album view. My first Liszt album is the Panorama set, a great introduction indeed.

About Me

Maybe everything that can be done HAS been done.
Maybe we are at a crossroads where art has exhausted itself as an imitation of life.
Maybe it is time, therefore, to allow life to become an imitation of art.
The art is in the living within our personal relationships: to reach out and touch another human soul as the great masters have touched us all.

If you want to share your playlist or just say hello, leave a comment or send me an email by clicking the image above. Thanks.

Greetings from the blogger

Hi everybody,

I am Chinese, 26 years old, have been listening to classical music for 6 years. I'm not a musician but work in the music industry, though one of my favourite quotes is Ives' "the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man, who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever."

In the beginning I saw the film Amadeus and was awed, then I began to build my collection started from Naxos' Mozart piano concertos. On my 20th birthday I got Bernstein's Mahler cycle with NYPO on Sony. Since then Mahler's nostalgia for a lost or never existed homeworld always moves me, you know that China is still going through the pain of a quick-paced modernization and I feel that things are changing so fast that it is almost impossible to identify myself with anything. Not many great classical concerts here in Beijing, last year I was lucky enough to attend Abbado's Mahler 4th and it will always be a very precious memory.

Recently I started to use the instant online streaming music service Spotify, it has a huge classical library, but it seems that very few people listen to classical on it. There are many Spotify playlist sharing sites, and many of them don't even have a classical section. So I started my own blog.

Besides the playlists I post, when I mention artists or recordings in the posts, most of the time I will link them to their Spotify ablums, so you can click through if you are interested.

I look forward to exchanging playlists and thoughts on classical music and other arts with you.